The Virgin Spring (1960)

The ideas about rape and male sexual violence represented in The Virgin Spring range from clear-sighted critique of 'purity' to images that seem to promote the same ideas about purity that otherwise seem to be the object of critique. Some contemporary reviewers considered the film to be an uncomplicated morality tale. I would not concur with this judgment: there are lots of ambiguities at play here, some of which Bergman might have been aware of, others not.

Bergman returns to the medieval settings and to be honest, Max von Sydow's speech that concludes the film crystallizes the Platonic Idea about Bergman-and-the-middle-ages. The story, based on an folk song, takes off from a family scene in which the daughter of Christian well-off farmers is dressed up to go to church and deliver candles. The daughter likes fine garments and she seems pampered and self-aware. Her opposite in the film is Odin-worshipping Ingeri, an 'unpure bastard' who comes along as a kind of servant. We get the sense that this other girl lives on the family's charity: they despise her but lets her work for them. On the way, after they have split up, the daughter meets a group of goatherders. What follows is a story about violence, revenge and repentance. If one reads the film charitably, Bergman contrasts the idea about the maiden who goes from pure to 'used' with the idea that some people are born to be conceived as 'dirty', as standing outside the rules of sexual mores. But this thread is cut off as soon as Bergman starts to build up his drama about revenge. The herdsmen who molested and killed his daughter comes to visit - they don't know it's her house - and the father contemplates how they are best to suffer. I'm not sure what Bergman tries to say here, and how seriously he takes the story about Christian and Pagan morality (there's a weird scene in which we see a pagan almost-god manipulating the natural elements). To me, this part of the film is executed in a half-hearted manner with a lot of boxy lines churned out by stiff actors, even though Max von Sydow acts in his usual forceful way when performing the agonized father whose mind is filled with thoughts about revenge and who goes about the business with an immense zeal. But at least Bergman relies on no simple conflict between Pagan and Christian as the meaning of both of these religions are questioned throughout the film.

For all its covert (or imagined, by me) critical content, I am disturbed by the images of 'purity'. The maidens golden locks are contrasted with the herdsmen, portrayed like brutes acting out of what is here seen like some primal force of lust. However, one of the herdsmen is a witness rather than an accomplice. In a few striking sections of the film, we see this boy's trauma over what his brothers have done. The point is here precisely that there is no 'pure' purity. One could also say the same thing about the maiden: her purity is constructed with her clothes and a certain social system. But granted that scene, the title of the film seems a bit odd.